About

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Princeton University, advised by Karthik Narasimhan. Previously, I graduated from Yao Class at Tsinghua University.

In my work, I build autonomous language agents to interact with the world, e.g. play text games (CALM), shop online (WebShop), answer questions and verify facts with a Wikipedia API (ReAct). Compared to language models that generate generic text, language agents that generate actions unlock infinite applications beyond sequence transduction, as well as opportunities to learn language via exploration rather than fixed and pre-selected text corpora.

In my life, I like reading, basketball, pool, travel, and rap.

To contact me, click the paper plane, which is a language grounding problem.

Some Recent Papers

  • ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
    Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, Yuan Cao
    paper | code | project | Google AI blogpost

  • WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents
    Shunyu Yao*, Howard Chen*, John Yang, Karthik Narasimhan
    NeurIPS 2022
    paper | code | project | demo

  • Linking Emergent and Natural Languages via Corpus Transfer
    Shunyu Yao, Mo Yu, Yang Zhang, Karthik Narasimhan, Joshua Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan
    ICLR 2022 (Spotlight)
    paper | code

  • Self-Attention Networks Can Process Bounded Hierarchical Languages
    Shunyu Yao, Binghui Peng, Christos Papadimitriou, Karthik Narasimhan
    ACL 2021
    paper | code

  • Reading and Acting while Blindfolded: The Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents
    Shunyu Yao, Karthik Narasimhan, Matthew Hausknecht
    NAACL 2021
    paper | code | project | Microsoft Research blogpost

  • Keep CALM and Explore: Language Models for Action Generation in Text-based Games
    Shunyu Yao, Rohan Rao, Matthew Hausknecht, Karthik Narasimhan
    EMNLP 2020
    paper | code

Some Recent Readings

  • Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (Charles King)
  • Istanbul—Hatıralar ve Şehir (Orhan Pamuk)
  • Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot (Bill O’Reilly, Martin Dugard)
  • The Linguistics Wars (Randy Allen Harris)
  • Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Matthew Perry)
  • What Babies Know (Elizabeth Spelke)

(last updated: Nov 2022)